Answers to common questions. This section is often
helpful to new customers and is at least worth a quick
glance.
| Is a spam filtering service more cost-effective
than purchasing virus and spam filtering software
and running it on our mail server? |
| Yes. Software installed on an email server must
be managed and maintained. And it's a CPU and disk-intensive
process. It lowers the effective capacity of your
server.
With the Minus Spam services, all maintenance
is done for you. We update our software on a continual
basis, to ensure that your protection is always
up to date. And with our Spam Filtering services,
we can remove the spam before it even reaches
your network. The end result: increased bandwidth
availability, and less load on your email servers.
Our customers see an average 60% decrease in incoming
email traffic with our spam filtering. |
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| How effective is Minus Spam's spam filtering
service? |
| On average, we recognize and filter over 90% of
incoming spam. |
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| What happens to email identified as spam? |
| We allow you to set the parameters for spam detection.
You can have any or all spam redirected to a web-based
repository. Or you can have it delivered with a
modified subject line or an additional email header.
You can even choose to filter out very spammy email,
while tagging and delivering email that has few
spam characteristics. |
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| Does this slow down my email delivery? |
| No. The typical message is processed by Minus
Spam in under 2 seconds, and is then on it's way
to your email server. Any increase in latency is
typically undetectable. |
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| If my email servers are unavailable, what
happens to my email? |
| Minus Spam holds your email and checks periodically
to see if your email servers have come back online.
When they do, we feed all the email we've been holding
in a controlled and measured manner, so your servers
don't get overwhelmed by a flood of pent-up email. |
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| How does this simplify our management? |
| You not only need not worry about about virus
or spam definition updates, you can simplify the
configuration of your email servers. If you limit
the servers to only send and receive email from
the Minus Spam network, you don't have to worry about
email routing configuration or troubleshooting. |
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| Do you protect individual users as well
as domains? |
| Yes. The only requirement for filtering individual
accounts is the ability to forward your existing
email to another email account. As an example, in
order for Joe Smith to use the Minus Spam filtering
service, he will need to tell his current email
provider to forward all incoming messages from his
'joe@<currentprovider.com>' account to 'joe@minusmessaging.com'.
That's it. |
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| Is my email confidential? |
| Yes. Minus Spam processes each email, looking
for spam and viruses, and then delivers it to the
destination. We don't view, or store it for any
other reason. Look for Minus Spam's email security
offerings - coming soon. |
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| How do I get started? |
| First you have to Sign Up.
Once you've signed up with Minus Spam, we will configure
our servers to start processing email on your behalf.
All you need to do is change the MX ("Mail
Exchanger") record of your DNS ("Domain
Name System") servers. Once you make the change,
the email starts to flow through our network, and
you're protected. You can be up and running in under
one hour! |
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| How can Minus Spam offer a flat-rate service
without any types of overage, bandwidth or usage
surcharges? |
Minus Spam has improved the efficiency of our
network, system and scanning processes to an unheard
of level. This means that we're able to offer
an incredible flat-rate pricing model. You pay
"per-user, per-month" regardless of
the amount of traffic that is passed through our
systems.
We believe that our customers need to be able
to budget their service needs. That's one of the
reasons we created this company - to offer the
ultimate in service and reliability, and to do
so in a way that's affordable and easy to budget
and understand. |
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| Per-user pricing just doesn't work for
us? Can you still help us? |
| Of course. We understand that there are some occasions
where the usage patterns don't make per-user pricing
models attractive. In this case, we're able to offer
usage-based pricing as well. |
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| What about the spam legislation? |
| While Minus Spam applauds and supports any anti-spam
legislation, we are realists. More than half the
spam sent today to users in the U.S. comes from
outside the United States. Unfortunately, we don't
see how the spam legislation is going to address
this issue. Given how inventive spammers have become
in hiding their identity, we expect that they'll
become more and more adept at hiding their location. |
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| How often does Minus Spam update anti-virus
software? |
| We check for updates every hour, and when new
ones are available, we broadcast them to all our
servers after they pass a comprehensive test suite.
You're protected as soon as the updates are available.
In some cases, we can put a filename or filetype
block in place to stop a fast moving virus even
before formal anti-virus definition updates are
available.
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| What happens to email that is infected
with a virus? |
| It is destroyed. We believe that an email that
has been infected is compromised. No cleaning service
can possibly insure that a "clean" email
hasn't been damaged in some way. |
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| What about virus-infected files that are
buried in Zip or StuffIt archives? |
| We recursively unpack all types of archives (zip,
arc, sit, lha, uuencoded, etc.) If an archive contains
an archive, that is also unpacked and scanned. |
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| Do we still need our desktop anti-virus
software if we're using the Minus Spam Service? |
| Yes. Our service is an excellent complement to
desktop and server software solutions. Since an
infection could come from a downloaded file, a cd-rom
or floppy disk, we recommend that you continue to
use desktop av software.
But today over 90% of all viruses are carried
by email, including virtually every fast-moving
virus. We've found that the update schedule for
email protection must be much more rapid than
for the typical desktop solution. |
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| What is "Store and Forward"? |
| We've heard this also called "mailbagging"
or "disaster recovery". Minus Spam's Store
and Forward services act as a secondary mail server
to your primary email servers. If your servers are
down, we hold all the email until they come back
up and are ready to accept email. Then we deliver
it in a smooth, controlled manner.
Minus Spam includes the Store and Forward service
in all of our other service offerings. If you
have us filter your email for viruses or spam,
we give you store and forward for free. |
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